The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2003, Volume 14

by Stephen Jones

  Card No. 18

  Description: Not a postal card, but rather a half-length portrait photograph mounted on thick pasteboard, of a family group from about the 1920s. The two parents are quite young, and formally dressed: the father in a dark suit, to which is pinned an unidentified order or medal. He holds a small Bible clasped to his breast. The woman is handsome, in a white lacy blouse buttoned to the top of her graceful neck, with masses of hair piled high on her head. The young daughter is quite simply beautiful, an angel.

  Text: would not have recognized, but for the signal distinctive wedding ring on her finger. “Mrs Fortesque”, I blurted out, as we stood amongst the milling crowd in the shade of the souk, “I had no idea—” but stopped when I saw the blush originating from beneath the missionary wife’s veil spread to her ample and attractive sun-browned bosom (a pendant black enamelled cross its sole decoration), with the attendant rush of blood turning the areolae – modestly without cinnabar – to the precise same shade of red so favoured by the local women. I saw, at the same time, the fleshy peaks slowly stiffen and stand, that motion drawing forth a corresponding response on my part, something I hardly had conceived feasible, after the trauma of the operation of four days ago, with the insertion of the papyrus strips to prevent rejoining of the separated parts while the healing occurred. “I should perhaps explain myself”, she said, regaining her composure. “The local rules are very strict; were I not, when attending to my public tasks and duties outside the house, to attire myself with what we consider wanton and promiscuous display, it would be here viewed as flagrant immodesty, and punishable, before the crowd, by the

  Card No. 19

  Description: An ossuary chapel, where the style of the classic Romanesque interior is partly obscured by the encrustation of thousands of skulls and skeletal parts, that form, or cover, the interior architecture. This photograph taken at the crossing, facing the nearby altar, where, instead of a crucifix or a monstrance, an enamelled or painted rectangular metal plaque stands upright, its left side white, its right black.

  Text: that the crucifix was now exchanged for a small pendant medallion, half black, half white, the symbol of the local cult. The thought of Mrs Fortesque having gone, so to speak, over to the other side was shocking, and at the same time extremely piquant and arousing, with my recently acquired knowledge of what that fully entailed for the woman involved. Having just come to the rendezvous from my daily session with the local doctor, who was treating me with that disgusting metallic green and gold powder, the source of which I was loath to ponder on, I scarcely thought myself physically capable of what was to follow, given my general and peculiar state. Nonetheless, when the missionary’s widow, after furtively glancing about only to find the chapel empty – no surprise, since it was midday and most families were at home, doors shuttered for the day’s largest repast – reached for and embraced me, the last thing I had awaited, I found myself responding in a most unexpected fashion. “But the children – your late husband –” I stammered, as she pushed me back against a column, so the decorative knobs of tibiæ and the like bruised my spine, with her bare breasts crushed against my chest and her hot searching lips

  Card No. 20

  Description: A statue, whose dimensions are given as 13 by 15 by 5 [in, it is assumed], these last representing the base. A female goddess, in flowing robes, very much gravid, standing in a bronze boat formed like the body of a duck, whose head is the prow. Within its open beak it holds a cube.

  Text: certain? It’s only been a month . . .” I lingered at these, my own words, astonished at the assertion. “Of course, I am” she snapped back, then, containing herself with difficulty, lowered her tone, and continued. “I’ve not been with anyone, before or since” she said, bitterly smiling. She was very much enceinte, astoundingly so, in a way that would have been impossible had I been responsible for her state. I kept on looking at her in bewilderment. My first thought was “propulsive force – perhaps; generative principal – never!!” Still holding my hand lightly, she followed up, saying “It does seem impossible, doesn’t it? Not just the time – I mean, given what had happened to you, in addition. Think, though, was anything odd done to you then, or about that time? I mean . . .” At that, the thought of the daily calls to the doctor snapped into mind. Once I had found out the disgusting source of the gold and green powders, I had ceased from visiting him again. Had our meeting in the ossuary been before or after the “treatment’s” short course? I could not remember, for the life of

  Card No. 21

  Description: Another souvenir card assumed to be from the local natural history collection, exhibiting a quite large centipede of unknown type, with several interesting and anomalous features. The scale beside it a millimetre stick, since centimetres would make the creature ridiculously large.

  Text: smooth and horrendously distended vulva with a disgusting plop. The three witches – I cannot think of them as being other than that – hurried to the trestle immediately, clicking the emerald daggers they had for tongues excitedly against their teeth. The multitudinous onlookers and priests held their distance. Mrs F seemed to be in a state of shock, but was still breathing with eyes closed. Horrified, I cast a look at Alicia, who stood imperturbed in her youthful nakedness, motionless, still holding the thick black candle cool as you like, as if she were in Westminster Abbey. The bloody caul and afterbirth were snipped at and cut with glassy tongues, and I saw, when the three stepped back, a foul, thick, twitching, segmented thing, snaky, glinting green and gold, thick as a moray eel, writhing between the poor woman’s bloody legs. The chief witch nodded to Alicia, who slowly moved forward, setting her candle carefully at her mother’s feet. At another signal, she picked up the glistening demonic shape, which unwound itself into a heavy, broad, segmented centipede-like beast of dimensions that left me gasping. Alicia uncoiled the slimy monster, gleaming with ichor, and draped the hellspawn ’round her shoulders, just as if it was a feather boa. Pausing only for a moment, she turned to me with a thin leer, and asked “Want to hold it? It’s yours too!” Revulsed, I turned, while she shrugged and set off on the ceremonial way, the crowd bowing to her and her half-brother, sister, or whatever, the belt of hollow birds’ eggs – her only adornment – clicking around her slim hips, brown from hours on the temple steps – as she swayed, during

  Card No. 22

  Description: A shining centipede probably of gold, coiled upon a dais of ebony, or some other dark wood, this last encrusted with bejewelled precious metal of arabesque form. The central object’s size may be inferred from the various items imbedded in it: Roman cameos, Egyptian scarabs, coins from crushed empires and forgotten kingdoms, some thousands of years old, the votive offerings of worshippers over the millennia we infer the sculpture to have existed. The object is fabulous; an utter masterwork of the goldsmith’s art rivalled only by the Cellini salt-cellar and one or two other pieces. It seems almost alive.

  Text: almost worth it. Calquon and Harrison are dead, what has become of Paul, who thought up all this, I have no idea. I have been subjected to the most hideous torture, and seen the most awful sights, that few can have experienced without losing their sanity. It is deeply ironic after all I have been through, that I by chance only yesterday discovered the object, hidden away in my belongings. What remains to be seen is whether I can bring it back to civilization with myself intact. I cannot trust Alicia, who has clearly let her elevation to high priestess and chief insect-keeper go to her head. During my last interview with her, whilst she dangled her shapely foot provocatively over the arm of her golden throne, I, in a vain effort to play upon her familial bonds and old self, reminded her of her younger brother, who had not been seen for days. At that she casually let drop that he had been sold on to Zanzibar (where there is, I believe, an active slave market), ultimately to disappear into one of the harems of the Arabian peninsula (Philby may be able to inform more fully). “I never could stand the little pest” was her remark, so it would be foolish to hope for
any sympathy from her quarter. I am being watched quite closely, with great suspicion. Can it be they know? If I ever leave here alive, it will be an absolute sensation. Biding my time, I cannot do anything now, but I can at least try to smuggle these surreptitiously scribbled notes out to the French vice-consul in the city where we bought the mules. He is a good fellow, though he drinks to excess at

  An additional 52 cards remain (see photo-copies), which although of great interest, bear no hand-written notes, and therefore are not described here, with the following single exception:

  Card: not in sequence, i.e. unnumbered by us

  Description: A photographic postal card of a large exterior wall of a stone building of enormous size. The impressive dimensions become apparent once one realizes that the small specks and dots on the stereobate of the vaguely classical structure are in fact people – some alone, others in groups, these last for the most part sheltered under awnings set up on the steps. What most catches the eye, however, is the magnificent low relief work covering most of the wall, depicting, it would seem, some mythological scene whose iconographic meaning is not apparent. It is in character a harmonious mixture of several ancient traditions: one sees hints of the Hellenistic, Indo-Grecian, and traces even of South-East Asian styles. The contrasts of tone make clear that the bare stone has been brightly painted.

  The relief itself: It appears that a judgement is being carried out. In the background, solemn ringlet-bearded men draped in graceful robes, all in the same pose, all copies of the other. All hold a square object, somewhat in form like a hand-mirror divided into one field black and one field white, and watch with blank eyes the man before them who is strapped to a plank, while a large fabulous beast, part man, part insect, with elements of the order Scolopendrida predominating, tears at him in the fashion of the Promethean eagles, and worse. To the right, a young priestess or goddess, nude but for a chain of beads or eggs around her waist, stands contrapposto, with one arm embraced about an obscene creature, a centipedal monstrousity of roughly her own height, leaning tightly upright against her. She is pointing with her free hand towards the tortured man. The expression on her empty face has affinities with several known Khmer royal portrait sculptures. She smiles faintly, as if in ecstasy.

  JEFF VANDERMEER

  The Cage

  JEFF VANDERMEER IS A WINNER of the World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. He has also been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the British Fantasy Award.

  Recent books include City of Saints and Madmen, which made more than a dozen year’s-best lists, and Veniss Underground. Forthcoming titles include the collection Secret Life from Golden Gryphon, the non-fiction Why Should I Cut Your Throat? from Monkey Brain Books, and the anthologies Album Zutique from Ministry of Whimsy and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases from Night Shade Books.

  In 2002, Locus Online named VanderMeer one of the top ten writers of short fantasy fiction.

  About the following story, the author recalls: “I was at a bar mitzvah party and, suddenly turning, I looked up and saw on this distant ledge/shelf, high up toward the ceiling of the building, this empty cage with iron bars. It was incongruous – nothing around it fit. It didn’t look like it belonged at all. The question that immediately came to me, and which raised the little hairs on my neck was: ‘What’s inside it?’ I don’t know why I thought that. But although the cage was empty, it didn’t seem empty.

  “Immediately, I was one of the first Ambergris Hoegbottons, looking up at the cage. I was in a mansion. Something terrible had happened or was going to happen . . . The idea was there, but I couldn’t write my way to it – all the drafts of first scenes were horrible. So I shelved it. Then, on a vacation to Tampa, my wife Ann and I stopped at the University of Tampa, which used to be a lush, lavish 1920s hotel. Inside, in one of the rooms, was a collection of old tables, chairs, grandfather clocks . . . and a cage. In that atmosphere, after hours, the place like a more opulent hotel from The Shining, again the cage seemed to contain something even though empty.

  “This time, the idea stuck. Just the image of it. Another year passed. I couldn’t write it but wanted to write it. I got the idea of starting with an inventory from Melville. That allowed me to both set the scene and define the main character. After I wrote the first scene, I asked myself what the story was about and discovered the story was about an obsessed character who encounters something so horrible that he cannot move past it. Then it was simply a matter of letting the events play out to their inevitable conclusion.

  “It was a tough story to write – the words fought me every sentence of the way. My favourite part of it is the main character’s relationship with his wife. I wanted to make a statement about the nature of love as part of any subplot. I wanted to make the reader finally realise that a somewhat proper character is actually deeply strange – and that, in a sense, we are all deeply strange creatures.”

  I

  THE HALL CONTAINED THE FOLLOWING ITEMS, some of which were later cataloged on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:

  24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood

  1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the

  5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors – lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and

  1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and

  8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop

  1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood

  8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice

  1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again – and beneath the clock

  1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal

  1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase

  1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to

  1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by

  1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pock
et watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-grey trousers. He stared at

  1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of

  1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab grey suit that he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set half-way up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-grey with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.